Novels since 1900

Saturday, October 11, 2008

This site presents the fossil remnants of a course I taught for one semester at Auckland University in 2008. Having inherited both the booklist and the structure of lectures, I wasn't able to introduce nearly as many innovations as I would have liked.

For instance, the reading list would have been very different if I'd had my way (for further details, see the blogpost here), and there would have been far more interactive tutorials and far fewer formal lectures.

Anyway, I haven't substantially revised it. It is what it is. I did try and give a kind of potted history of twentieth-century culture as an accompaniment to the discussion of the eight novels, so there's probably some material here which may continue to be of general interest. I feel a certain fondness for some of the connections I managed to make in the heat of the moment.

Student responses were, I would have to say, somewhat mixed. Quite a lot of them enjoyed the New Historicist gestures towards more social history and contextualisation of the novels; others would clearly have preferred to stay with the previous emphasis on New Critical close readings.

You can't please all of the people all of the time. As long as you please yourself, though ... I guess that's the main thing.Administration:

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

We'll be talking some more about the exam, about the different types of "reading" available to us, "dirty" (i.e. historicist) or "clean" (i.e. formalist), and the ways in which they can be related to various different books in the course.

I'll also be speculating, in the last lecture of all, on what new directions the novel is pursuing now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Two suggestive quotes from Louise Erdrich's travel book Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2003):

Very traditional people are very careful about attribution. When a story begins there is a prefacing history of that story's origin that is as complicated as the Modern Language Association guidelines to forming footnotes. [p.39]

and:

... Would it be better to confront an ill-motived intruder who was well read, or one indifferent to literature? [p.94]

The English storm the platform in the picture above (from a production of the dramatisation by Santha Rama Rau - basis for the later film by David Lean).

Professor Don Smith, who was at the first performance of the play, tells me that there were a lot of complaints by reviewers afterwards about the "impossibility" of the scene where all the English characters move out of the body of the courtroom to sit up on a level with the judge. They reiterated the old complaint that Forster simply didn't know the Anglo-Indians.

He did know them. He just didn't like them. The scene is (of course) in the novel.

Don said it was fascinating to see Forster sitting there, at the front of the hall, hunched in his chair, saying nothing. Difficult to tell if he enjoyed the show or not.

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Contact details for the stage two and stage three student representatives for 220/356 are now available here.